How I made $1000 in Commissions on Amazon Prime Day 2017

This was my first Prime day as an affiliate marketer and I am happy with the results. As promised, I am going to share everything I did to make $1000+ on Prime day 2017. You can apply the same tips for any other upcoming sales including Black Friday.

As always, I am not going to share any URLs in this article. If you believe you can’t learn without seeing the websites under discussion, you just can’t.

To avoid any confusions, I’d like to make few things clear for you.

There were a total of 3 websites and 2 Amazon accounts that were involved on Prime day. Website 1 brought in the major amount of sales and it was using Amazon account 1. The websites 2 and 3 were using Amazon account 2. Reasons these websites use different Amazon accounts is because the website 1 is co-owned by another partner as well, so I am using their account.

Total Ordered Revenue: $23,566

Commissions (Approx.): $1000+

Website 1 (Amazon Account 1) – $16,253 in Sales

Websites 2,3 (Amazon Account 2) – $7,313 in Sales

There are two major things that I did and I am going to explain in detail.

1. Benefit from Existing Traffic

I had ~150 daily visitors on website 1, ~200 on website 2 and less than 100 on site 3. Your main goal on prime day should be to make maximum people click on your affiliate links. Once a user has clicked your link to Amazon, your job is done. Almost everyone has something in cart on prime day and the chances of people buying through your links are high. So make sure your goal is make maximum people click on your affiliate links.

But how?

So I came across a post in a FB group, The Cloud Living Community, where Rahul Yadav, a very active group member shared a previous year post from Will Blears. The post had some useful tips on how to maximize your earnings on Prime day. Of all tips, there was one that said to use a Hello Bar or some other sticky bar on your website directing your visitors to Amazon deals page.

I went ahead and designed a sticky bar but with some added creativity. I added a countdown timer in an attempt to leverage scarcity marketing. It turned out really well and I am going to explain how I did it.

Luckily, I had membership of Thrive Ultimatum. It’s a scarcity marketing plugin for WordPress that boosts your conversion rates. And you don’t really need to be a tech geek to implement this. It’s as easy as it gets. Simple drag n drop builder and you can setup a beautiful countdown timer within 5 minutes.

Here is what I did:

When Do I Start Displaying the Countdown Timer?

My timer didn’t start appearing on my website when prime day started. It was actually already there before prime day began; 10 hours before Prime day to be exact.

Why?

I just didn’t want to lose the traffic day before Prime day. So any clicks in those 10 hours might still help me grab commissions on Prime day sales in the first 14 hours. (24 hours cookie). I basically had a separate countdown timer for pre-prime day hype that said something like this:

Key Takeaways

Place your CTAs at a prominent location. Choice of color matters as well.

Start displaying countdown timer before the event so you get maximum clicks for the event ahead.

It’s good to have Thrive Ultimatum but if you don’t have the money to buy this plugin, go for a free alternative like Hello Bar, SumoMe, etc.

Leverage scarcity marketing tactic.

2. Drive More Traffic

There was no SEO involved in driving the extra traffic on Prime day. 100% traffic was social acquired through different platforms that I am going to explain below.

But let’s take a look at Prime day traffic:

See that sharp curve? My regular daily traffic is 150-200 visitors on average whereas the website received around 5000 sessions on Prime day. More than 70% of traffic came through social platforms. Take a look.

And here is a real-time traffic snapshot I was able to capture:

FYI, strategies to drive more traffic were implemented on only 1 website i.e. website 1.

What Pages Did I Create?

I had no idea about how prime day deals work. At first, I simply created a page with best deals that I thought I’d update when Prime day starts.

But when it started, I realized most deals are lightning deals i.e. they last for 3-4 hours only. So I changed my strategy and tried to find deals that were going to last till end of Prime day or atleast 12 hours.

Focus on spotlight deals. Those are the ones that are selling fast and I found most of them were valid till end of prime day.

I went ahead and created a new deals with page. That was it about creating content. Next is leveraging social platforms to drive traffic to these pages.

Promoting on Social Platforms

Facebook

One of the products I was promoting has a dedicated group on Facebook with more than 400k members. And luckily, they do allow posts with affiliate links. This was a major win and traffic from this group was totally surprising. I shared my post in some other groups as well which also helped.

I spent $10 on Facebook ad campaigns as well but that didn’t help much, so I stopped.

Reddit

Reddit is the 9th most visited website in the United States (Source). I already knew a lot of bloggers leveraging this platform to drive traffic but never gave it a try. So on Prime day, I dropped my link in a couple of sub-reddits and results were amazing. 729 sessions through reddit. There are a lot of sub-reddits related to prime day deals as well where you can post your links.

Stumbleupon

102 sessions came through Stumbleupon. All I did was submitted my link on Stumbleupon. Your page is initially displayed to 3-4 visitors and the more thumbs up it receives, the bigger audience it reaches. So you need to create a deals page that people find interesting.

Key Takeaways

Create an aesthetically pleasing deals page. More importantly, keep it clean and make your Call-to-Action (CTAs) prominent so more and more people click on.

Include spotlight products as more people are likely going to buy them as compared to products from a random category.

If you’ve just joined a FB group and posted your link, you will get banned most likely. Make sure you follow the group rules when posting. It’s good if you join these groups some time before the event. And try to deliver value so you are in their good books.

The more groups you join, the greater the chance of people clicking through your links.

Find relevant sub-reddits where you can submit link to your deals page. It’s better to use an aged reddit account for this since most sub-reddits don’t allow fresh accounts to submit links.

If you’re page is well-designed and features some of the best deals, make sure you submit it to Stumbleupon.

Remember! For social traffic, it all boils down to the amount of creativity you add to your deals page. Make it share-worthy and people won’t hesitate sharing it.

Just like Prime day, you can use same tips to benefit from some of the biggest sales of the year including Black Friday and Christmas sales. Let me know if you’ve any questions.

Great post, I’ve registered for Amazon Affiliate just a few days back before prime day, so was not having that much audience, but I hope I will have a massive audience before next prime day 🙂 thanks for sharing

This is a very brilliant idea, I have learn alot from this post, and I believe the method can be implemented beyond amazon prime day. Thanks for sharing this awesome tips, and I hope you keep up earning big.

Aqib you are great. You are sharing something which I am sure mostly of the people will not share. You have a great content at no cost. I am sure many internet maketer can use this peace of advice and guide to manage some bucks on the next deals day on Amazon. Thanks again for this awesome post on prime day earning. I also tried myself to earn on that day but could not due to failed strategy used.

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About Me

I have been helping people build websites since 2012. Apart from sharing my personal digital marketing experiences, this website is aimed at helping bloggers, digital marketers and business owners grow their business online.

I live and breathe SEO and that’s where most of my income comes from.

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No secret between friends. I get compensated by some of the services I recommend on this website, which means that whenever you make a purchase using a link form my website, I receive commissions at NO EXTRA COST to you. This website is independently owned and the recommendations and opinions expressed here are my own.